Macromedia Fireworks

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Fireworks is similar in purpose to the popular Adobe Photoshop, though it does not offer the range and sophistication of features of the latter. With the release of Macromedia Studio 8, Fireworks may finally be able to compete with Photoshop with a variety of new blend modes. There is still question as to how much more the brushing capabilities will advance in the new version of Fireworks, and this would be the only thing that would still make Photoshop any more useful in the creation of art as the brushes in Photoshop are much more customizeable and stylized whereas FireWorks are basic and not as advanced.

In April 2005, Adobe announced that they would acquire Macromedia. How the two product lines would merge is still an open question. Besides Photoshop as a competitor to FireWorks, Adobe also makes Adobe GoLive, a webpage-authoring application that competes with Macromedia Dreamweaver. Many believe that Adobe Photoshop (or one of its less-capable variants such as Photoshop Elements) will eventually replace Fireworks and GoLive will be phased out in favour of the more popular Dreamweaver.

=Features of Fireworks=

Fireworks contains a number of features that make it unique as well as a viable alternative to Adobe Photoshop or other graphic editing softwares. Whilst it is not superior in any way to PS s photoediting and brushing abilities, FW is more geared towards the creation of graphics for websites or various web applications.

==Docked Menus==

All menus and even some extensions can be docked in the fireworks environment. This ensures that windows will never get in the way of the canvas. Within the docks, menus can be collapsed and expanded to allow a high level of accesability as well as convienience.

==The Fireworks Toolbar==

The toolbar in FW contains 34 buttons. Some buttons can be held down to reveal a submenu of variations on each tool. For example, as the dodge and burn tools are used to lighten or darken an image and are similar, they can be found within the same submenu. This system of organization saves a lot of space and is very useful to graphic editors trying to save as much space on-screen as possible.

Pointer Tool

The Pointer Tool contains a submenu of 2 items. It is represented by a black-filled cursor. *Selection Tool - The Selection tool allows the selection of an entire entity within the canvas, or a group of entities by shift clicking multiple items in succesion. *Select Behind Tool - The Select Behind tool allows the selection of an entity that is below another in the layer order.

Subselection Tool

The Subselection tool contains no submenu. It is represented by a white cursor. The subselection tool is used to select elements within an entity such as a waypoint in a vector path, or a tension spline within a waypoint. This tool can be used to frag full entities around to allow for convienience.

Scale Tool

The Scale Tool contains a submenu of 3 items. It is represented by a box with a diagonal arrow. *Scale Tool - The scale tool allows you to resize an entity in the X or Y dimensions, and also allows you to keep the image size in the proper ratio by holding SHIFT while scaling. This tool also allows for rotation of an entity. *Skew Tool - The skew tool allows the skewing of images. *Distort Tool - The distort tool allows you to twist the image and add perspective.

= External links =

*[http://macromedia.com/software/fireworks/ Macromedia Fireworks] *[http://nathanpitman.com/journal/373/ Macromedia Fireworks Extensions] *[http://solardreamstudios.com/ SolarDream Studios - The site of a very talented FW user, contains some useful tutorials] *[http://playingwithfire.com/ Playing With Fire - FW resource site]